In January 2004, Orleans Parish School Board President Ellenese Brooks-Simms, dressed in her typical high style, pulled her burgundy late-model Cadillac up to McDonogh No. 35 High School. She knew nothing of the palace coup awaiting at that night's meeting.
And Brooks-Simms' board colleagues had no clue she had taken a $50,000 bribe that same day, the second in a series of three kickbacks totaling $140,000.
Even so, her erstwhile allies Jimmy Fahrenholtz and Una Anderson turned on her that night, demanding she stop meddling in system patronage and undermining Superintendent Tony Amato. Shouting and cursing ensued backstage. Minutes later, just before voting to dethrone Brooks-Simms as president, Anderson summed up the intrigue in a whispered aside: "Welcome to the Roman Arena."
In hindsight, that day signaled the beginning of the end for the Orleans Parish School Board. During the next year, the board would melt down so spectacularly that, by the time Hurricane Katrina hit, the wholesale state takeover of the city schools would become a fait accomplit.
Brooks-Simms' comeuppance was completed in this week's bribery trial, in which she testified against her benefactor Mose Jefferson, brother of recently convicted former U.S. Rep. Bill Jefferson, and of the indicted Betty Jefferson, the former School Board member and current 4th District assessor.
A jury on Friday convicted Mose Jefferson on four of seven counts, including two counts of bribery and two for obstruction of justice. He likely faces between five and eight years in prison.
Mose and Betty Jefferson will go on trial again soon in a separate corruption case alleging they looted nonprofits meant to aid the poor.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/25/2009 00:00 ||
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#1
.. in a separate corruption case alleging they looted nonprofits meant to aid the poor.
As opposed to simply looting the public treasury to do the same, "..in the name of the poor". And which faction seems to always play that line?/rhetorical question.
#3
Well, it's a good thing these people aren't Democrats. Apparently they are not associated with any political party as I don't see one mentioned in the article.
Faced with a souring public mood on health care reform, Democrats and their supporters are launching a national grassroots push Wednesday to show lawmakers that the majority of Americans still support overhauling the system.
Reform supporters are planning to hold more than 500 events between Wednesday and when lawmakers return to Washington Sept. 8, ranging from neighborhood organized phone banks to professionally staffed rallies with hundreds of people.
The Democratic National Committee and its grassroots arm, Organizing for America, are helping to organize the effort along with the Health Care for America Now, a group pushing to create government-run insurance plan.
"In these last few weeks of recess we want to demonstrate the energy, passion and commitment that the American people have to health insurance reform so that when members return after Labor Day they know that they can turn their attention to getting this done because they have the backing of the American people," said DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse.
Supporters have their work cut out for them. Many lawmakers were thunderstruck over the August recess by the anger and outrage expressed by their constituents in town hall meetings across the country. And in poll after poll, support for reform has eroded throughout the month.
But Democrats and their allies insist that the majority of Americans still support reform and have organized the grassroots campaign to buck up lawmakers as they get ready to head back to Washington.
A health-insurance-reform-now bus will travel the country starting Wednesday and anchor events in 11 cities: Phoenix, Albuquerque, Denver, Des Moines, Pittsburgh, Raleigh, Charlotte, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio.
But the talk of broad health insurance reform does not mean that progressives have backed off their push for a government-run insurance option.
"We want members of Congress to get back to work and pass reform that means something. We need affordable care. We need real insurance regulation. And we need a strong public health insurance option," said HCAN spokeswoman Jacki Schechner. "It's doable and we expect it to get done now." But these will be genuine unlike the townhalls/sarc
#2
Yeah! It's about time they showed the world how real astroturfing is done! (I'm sure it will be covered heavily by my local Pravda outlets, the Cedar Rapids Gazette and the Iowa City Press-Citizen. They were just too busy this summer to cover the local town halls. Good thing we're coming up on a slow news time, right?)
#4
I heard him on Levin's show this evening. I didn't catch the answer to the running for office question though. Might be on MarkLevinShow.com later, though.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) could face a tough reelection race in 2010, according to a new, independent poll released this weekend. But... but... It was the little woman who was convicted, not him! And looking at those two you'd be convinced that there was no pillow talk ...
40 percent of Conyers's constituents said he deserved reelection, according to a poll conducted earlier this month by the Lansing, Mich.-based Deno Noor Polling, in conjunction with the Rossman Group and Perricone Group. 44 percent of Detroiters represented by Conyers said they would prefer to elect someone else. 15 percent were unsure or didn't know.
The 80-year-old Conyers has served in Congress since 1965, making him one of the longest-serving members of Congress still in office. He could face a challenging reelection, though, due to the conviction of his wife, Monica Conyers, for bribery charges incurred while she served as President Pro Tempore of the Detroit City Council.
Rep. Conyers has dodged questions about his wife's conviction, and it isn't clear whether the couple has maintained a close relationship in recent years.
Still, 76 percent of those surveyed said the conduct of Monica Conyers wouldn't affect how they would vote for her powerful husband. I'm not at all sure why that's so. If my wife was convicted in crookery and I was in the same line of work you might think I'd have a hand in it, too, or a least that we traded techniques over dinner.
Another Detroit lawmaker's political future could be imperiled by a family member's illicit political conduct, as well. 27 percent of Detroiters said Rep. Carolyn Cheek Kilpatrick (D-Mich.) deserves reelection almost a year after she was almost unseated in a Democratic primary challenge. 58 percent said that someone else should replace Kilpatrick, with 14 percent undecided.
Kilpatrick won a hotly-contested three-way primary last August with 39 percent of the vote after her son, former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, was forced from office after pleading guilty to charges stemming from his testimony denying an extramarital affair to which he later admitted.
60 percent of Detroiters said the former mayor's conduct would have no bearing on their vote for Kilpatrick, who's served in Congress since being elected in 1996.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/25/2009 00:00 ||
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#1
perhaps an IQ test should be required in Detroit?
Posted by: Frank G ||
08/25/2009 0:23 Comments ||
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Frank, the voters there probably couldn't even spell IQ.
I called Rep. Chellie Pingree's office a day or so ago to inquire whether she would be holding one or more "town hall" forums where I could ask her a few questions about the pending health-care reform bill working its way through Congress. The person who answered the phone, however, told me she had no plans to do so.
I was disappointed. After all, she works for us.
If she's worried about being confronted by "unruly mobs of Nazis," as Speaker Nancy Pelosi has described those who show up at "town halls" to ask questions of their elected representatives, I suggest that's a poor excuse for a Maine congresswoman to hide out.
Maine people are civil. She should know that by now.
If I'd met with her, I would have asked her the following questions:
1. Have you read the House bill in its entirety? I have downloaded all 1,017 pages of it and am currently working my way through it.
2. Can you promise me that I will not lose my current plan and doctor? President Barack Obama says it's "not legitimate" to claim the "public option is somehow a Trojan horse for a single-payer system." But Reps. Barney Frank, D-Mass., Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., and Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman have all admitted that the public option will inevitably lead to government-run health care. The independent and non-partisan Lewin Group estimates that about 83.4 million people would lose their private insurance if the current health-care bill becomes law.
3. Can you promise me that you and your family will enroll in the public plan? Pingree and her family currently receive health care through the popular and completely public-option-free, Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP). That program allows members of Congress to choose among 283 private health insurance plans.
If the public plan is so great, then members of Congress should be willing to forfeit their private coverage and join the millions of Americans who would be moved into the public plan. Why not simply offer FEHBP as the public option? It seems to me that to do so would eliminate all the new expensive bureaucracy that accompanies the proposed public plan.
4. Can you promise me that the proposed public plan will not lead to higher deficits in the long term? President Obama said that he wouldn't support health-care legislation that would add to the national deficit.
But Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Elmendorf has stated that the House health-care legislation would "generate substantial increases in federal budget deficits during the decade beyond the current 10-year budget window."
5. Can you promise me that government bureaucrats will not ration health care for patients on the public plan? President Obama promised on July 22 that health-care reform would keep the government out of health-care decisions, but both the House and Senate bills call for an increased role of Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER). More information about health-care effectiveness is good, as long as doctors and patients are the ones empowered to use that information.
Members of Congress in both the House and Senate offered amendments prohibiting the use of CER by government to mandate, deny or ration care. These anti-rationing amendments were defeated in both the House and Senate.
I'm sure that I'm not the only person who would like answers to these questions from Congresswoman Pingree. Perhaps she will respond to my questions by a letter to the Morning Sentinel. I certainly hope so. These questions deserve answers.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/25/2009 00:00 ||
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Mayor Ray Nagin said he was "quite surprised" by the barbs traded this week between District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro and Police Superintendent Warren Riley.
Cannizzaro said publicly that he doesn't think the New Orleans Police Department stacks up to the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office and the FBI. Riley later decried the comments as harmful to the city's reputation.
Nagin on Friday echoed Riley's observation that all seemed fine just a few weeks ago. "I was out there with the DA during Night Out Against Crime and I just saw a totally different thing: He and the chief were pretty lovey-dovey. So I don't know what happened. Sounds like they had a little spat, " the mayor said.
Nagin also expressed concern about the effect Cannizzaro's comments could have on officers. "I just worry about that from a standpoint of what's the officers on the street hearing, " he said. "Keep in mind, these officers have been with us, most of them, since Katrina. Eighty percent of them suffered damage to their homes. They haven't had a lot of time for a break, and they continue to work very hard.
"We're trying to get the criminal justice system to work together, and then the DA comes out and says that, " Nagin said. "I'm just going to chalk it up that he had a bad day. Something must have happened earlier that day and, hopefully, we won't have an outburst like that in the future."
Posted by: Fred ||
08/25/2009 00:00 ||
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Patronage workers with the Cook County Forest Preserve District are seeing more green these days -- in their paychecks.
With people everywhere facing tough financial times, the 28 forest preserve patronage workers who've been on the payroll since 2006 all got hefty raises in the following two years, an analysis by the Chicago Sun-Times and the Better Government Association has found. They're among 38 forest preserve workers who are exempt from the Shakman court order that bans political hiring in city and county government.
On average, the exempt employees were paid $98,071 last year. Nine of them saw their salaries increase 19 percent or more between 2006 and 2008. Most of the Shakman-exempt employees -- 24 in all -- have contributed to the campaign funds of Cook County Board President Todd Stroger; his late father, former board President John Stroger; or the 8th Ward Regular Democratic Organization that John Stroger controlled.
The Strogers and the party organization have gotten a total of $49,870 in campaign contributions from the exempt employees since the mid-1990s. The biggest contributor: Deputy Comptroller Alvin Lee ($12,100), followed by district police chief Richard Waszak ($8,050).
That's their right, says district spokesman Steve Mayberry, who says Todd Stroger never has solicited forest preserve employees for campaign cash. "It is the First Amendment right of all private citizens ... to make political contributions to whomever they please," says Mayberry, himself a Shakman-exempt employee who has given $3,905 to Stroger organizations.
The number of exempt employees amounts to less than 7 percent of the district's 564-person work force.
"The current Shakman-exempt list is a result of long and careful debate," Mayberry says. "It is intended to recognize the need for the president of Cook County and the Forest Preserve District of Cook County to have some confidential employees in leadership positions."
Posted by: Fred ||
08/25/2009 00:00 ||
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(CNSNews.com) -- President Barack Obama is "quite comfortable" with the prospect of being a one-term president in order to address the issues he is concerned about, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Friday.
The comment came on the same day the president's approval reached a new low, with only a 45 percent approval rating in the Zogby International poll released Friday. The poll said that 51 percent disapprove of the president's job performance. The Real Clear Politics average of all polls puts the president approval rating at 52.2 percent.
Gibbs was addressing a question about a comment made by Rep. Leonard Boswell (D-Iowa), who said the president told him he is willing to risk a second term to get a health care overhaul bill approved.
Gibbs said that would be true of most issues.
"I don't know that I've specifically heard him on health care," said Gibbs, "but I have heard the president say that if making tough decisions in getting important things done that Washington has failed to do for decades means that he only lives in this house and makes those decisions for four years, he's quite comfortable," Gibbs told reporters at the White House press briefing.
"The way he approaches this issue, the economy, Afghanistan and Iraq, any of these issues is not in a mode of self preservation, but in a mode of how best -- given all the information out there-- how best to make decisions that he thinks is in the best interest of the American people, not what's in the best interest of his personal career," Gibbs said.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/25/2009 00:00 ||
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#1
Better he should quit while he's ahead.
I bet he could make a nice living on the lecture circuit, blaming the vast, right-wing conspiracy for his failures.
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/25/2009 6:24 Comments ||
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Palin set the example, when she believed because of unrelenting bogus ethics attacks that she had nothing more to contribute to the people of Alaska, to step aside. Wonder when people will be encouraging the egotist Obama to follow the same? Nah, never happen.
#3
I dunno, p2k. Maybe if they could offer him an enticing alternative....like a very lucrative offer to pen a third autobiography.....why, he could just use another title from the sermons of his spiritual leader Rev. Wright! I'm sure he would find either "The U. S. of KKK-A" or "God D*** America!" would sell well to his loyal fans.
Some have analogized Barack Obama's current situation with that of Bill Clinton, who pushed a wholesale revision of the country's health-care system in 1993 with results that should have served as a warning to Obama. But the more relevant analogy is with Jimmy Carter in 1977.
We are watching a replay of what happened with Carter, elected in 1976 as a repudiation of the hated Richard Nixon and his selected successor (and pardoner) Gerald Ford. Carter misinterpreted the election results as a mandate for sweeping change he thought he (an Annapolis graduate, nuclear engineer, and published author) was uniquely qualified to enact.
On December 17, 1977, reviewing Carter's first year, Russell Baker wrote that:
When voting for Presidents . . . even learned persons seem temporarily to suspend disbelief in miracles. During the Carter campaign it was common to meet men and women who had marinated a quarter-century and more in politics and should, therefore, have been beyond innocence, yet who insisted, often with passion, that the Democrat Carter in harness with a Democratic Congress would do marvels for the Republic.
These marvels have not occurred.
Hedrick Smith, in a long analysis in the January 8, 1978, New York Times, summarized what had happened:
Jimmy Carter first surprised and impressed the professional pols in 1976 with the cold, cocksure, methodical manner with which he stalked the Presidency. The surprise of 1977 was that Jimmy Carter was actually not the master politician they had imagined. . . . President Carter's exaggerated aspirations and his profusion of proposals invited inevitable disappointment.
Four years later, Carter published his memoirs, which (in the words of Times reviewer Terrence Smith in 1982) admitted he had "overloaded the legislative agenda" in his early months in office and "the result was that his most cherished domestic initiatives--welfare and tax reform and a national health program--went down to early defeat." His presidency never fully recovered.
How had the American people elected someone with seemingly so much promise who fizzled so quickly? The day after Carter's 1976 election, the Times explained how a one-term governor, with no significant record, had secured the nomination from more experienced rivals and defeated a sitting president. He did it with the same techniques that Obama would use 32 years later.
First, a slogan--repeated ad nauseam--promising voters a "government as good as the American people," which not only promised change but made voters think that by voting for him it reflected well on them.
Second, presentation of himself as a unifier--a reconciliation of North and South, white and black, conservatives and liberals. He was certified as The One at the Democratic Convention, with the closing benediction of the father of Martin Luther King Jr., who told the delegates and the entire country watching on all three networks that "Surely the Lord sent Jimmy Carter to come on out and bring America back where she belongs."
Third, the use of a new technique in American politics--the well-written autobiography as a substitute for prior accomplishments. The Times review, written by a member of the editorial board, called the book a blend of "personal history, social description and political philosophy that makes fascinating reading" and that assertedly showed that Carter was reminiscent of Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy in his commitment to "governing."
After a year in office, it became apparent that a great slogan, image, and autobiography were not by themselves sufficient for an inexperienced politician with grandiose ideas to govern the United States. And Carter's foreign-policy disasters were still ahead of him.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/25/2009 00:00 ||
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You really didn't think Carter would be the worst president ever.
I had a lot more hope for Carter's change in 1977 than I do for this One, even after I'd seen Carter as Governor of Georgia. The One has even less experience. The US of A ain't da sout side community. (da sout sida Chicago, dat is.)
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/25/2009 6:12 Comments ||
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the use of a new technique in American politics--the well-written autobiography as a substitute for prior accomplishments
To a postmodernist, this is perfectly 'reasonable'.
The narrative IS the reality, to a postmodernist. Facts on the ground really don't matter as much as the preservation of a desired narrative. Environment and nature don't define reality, desire does.
So, to the left, which has largely bought into postmodernist philosophical models, the pretty autobiography is not a subsitute for actual accomplishment, it is SUPERIOR to them.
Mass insanity.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
08/25/2009 6:20 Comments ||
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I agree that Obama is like Carter. On the other hand, we are still suffering from Carter's f*ck ups, almost thirty years later.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
08/25/2009 7:31 Comments ||
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Bobby, the title of Worst President Ever was permanently claimed by James Buchanan. There is no possible contest.
Posted by: Eric Jablow ||
08/25/2009 8:20 Comments ||
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The South Side of Chicago does, however, have LEON'S BBQ - enough to make one drool. BTW, the takeout restaurant is dvides the employee cooking side from the customer side with bullet-proof glass. Money and food are slid through a small revolving bullet proof arrangement. Tough city...Tough people.
#8
Eric, call no man or nation happy until they're dead. There's always the chance of some future Buchanan smashing the country up to such an extent that his successor can't hammer the pieces back into place. Not that I expect Obama to be that future Buchanan.
He doesn't have the experience Buchanan had, for one thing.
Posted by: Mitch H. ||
08/25/2009 18:19 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
In January 2004, Orleans Parish School Board President Ellenese Brooks-Simms, dressed in her typical high style, pulled her burgundy late-model Cadillac up to McDonogh No. 35 High School. She knew nothing of the palace coup awaiting at that night's meeting.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) could face a tough reelection race in 2010, according to a new, independent poll released this weekend.
Mayor Ray Nagin said he was "quite surprised" by the barbs traded this week between District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro and Police Superintendent Warren Riley.
Patronage workers with the Cook County Forest Preserve District are seeing more green these days -- in their paychecks.
(CNSNews.com) -- President Barack Obama is "quite comfortable" with the prospect of being a one-term president in order to address the issues he is concerned about, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Friday. 
